Enterprise network wireless local area networks (WLANs) managers and users are reporting several challenges, including security, interference mitigation, dynamic traffic management and user management. While experts believe that security is being addressed by a number of companies and standards, the severity of the interference, dynamic traffic engineering and user management challenges is rising rapidly with the increasing number of deployed WLANs and WiFi enabled laptops, PDAs and cell phones, the convergence of WiFi and 3G/4G cellular systems and the growth in the use of the unlicensed ISM and UNI bands by non-WiFi traffic.
A unique performance issue of wireless networks is unpredictable user and application load. Since users of the network are un-tethered and nomadic by nature, they can move from cell to cell sometimes dramatically shifting the traffic loads of the various cells within the extended network. This unpredictable load can cause wide fluctuations in performance causing frustration for end-users expecting the predictability of “wired” networks.
Interference can also impact network performance. Interference can come in many forms. Interference can occur when internal elements introduce noise or interference to your environment. For example, an escalator in retail stores, a piece of machinery on a factory floor or copier in an office. This type of interference could be constant or intermittent. Regardless, this interference can have a significant impact on network capacity and performance.
Interference can also occur from external elements. For example, a neighboring enterprise or home could set up its own wireless network within the same frequency or spectrum. When this occurs, both networks are now contending for the same airspace. This overlapping interference will drive down the performance of the two networks.
The IEEE 802.11 standard uses signal strength assign mobile stations to access points. The rational behind this approach is that a strong signal indicates a good channel with a potentially high throughput. Unfortunately, the access point corresponding to the strongest channel may be overloaded and assigning a new station to it may lead to significant loss in throughput.
Another approach to WLAN performance management is balancing users across access points. This method is a simplistic way of balancing workloads in an attempt to improve performance. It assumes that users have similar bandwidth requirements and are experiencing similar channel conditions, counts users, and then allocates equal numbers across access points. What this approach does not consider is users' actual application requirements at a given point in time and the actual channel condition that it sees. A given user or application can overwhelm an access point's performance thus rendering the network inoperable for other connected users. Thus such approaches fail to consider actual network traffic and channel conditions.
In view of the above problems and issues, there is a need in the art for the present invention.